Why Mermaids Sing (22 page)

S
ebastian found Felix Atkinson in the drawing room of his prosperous West End home. The East India Company man stood with his back to the room, his gaze fixed on the scene outside the window overlooking Portland Place. In a damask-covered chair off to one side, a pale-haired woman in her early thirties wept quietly into a handkerchief. As far as Sebastian could see, her husband was making no attempt to comfort her.

“I’d like a word with you,” Sebastian told Atkinson. “Alone.”

Atkinson swung to face him, all bluster and trembling affront. “Really, my lord. Now is hardly the time—”

Sebastian cut him off. “I don’t think you want Mrs. Atkinson to hear what I have to say.”

A rush of color darkened the other man’s cheeks. He cast a quick glance at his wife, then looked away. “We can speak in the morning room.”

They had barely crossed into the morning room before Sebastian’s hands closed over Atkinson’s shoulders and spun him around to slam his spine up against the nearest wall.

“You bloody, self-obsessed, lying son of a bitch,” said Sebastian, spitting out each word through gritted teeth.

Atkinson gasped and made as if to pull away. “How dare you? How dare you lay hands upon me in my own h—”

Sebastian pressed his forearm against the man’s throat, pinning him to the wall. “I know what happened on that ship. I know about Gideon Forbes, and I know what really happened to David Jarvis.”

Atkinson went utterly still. “You can’t.”

“I read the log.”

“The log? But the log was lost. Bellamy said the log was lost.”

“He lied.” Sebastian shoved his forearm up under the man’s chin harder. “You all lied. What did you do? Get together after Thornton’s and Carmichael’s sons were killed and swear one another to secrecy?”

“What choice did we have?”

“You could have told the truth.”

Atkinson’s tongue darted out to moisten his lips. “How could we? No one would have understood about the boy. You have no idea what it was like on that ship. The fear. The endless days and nights of hunger. That kind of hunger, it’s like a yawning pit of fire in your belly, consuming you. You’ll do anything when you’re hungry like that.”

“You might. Yet people starve to death on the streets of London all the time. They don’t kill and eat each other.”

Atkinson sucked in a breath that shook his entire frame. “The boy was dying. All we did was hasten the hour of his death. David Jarvis should never have tried to stop us.”

“Is that what you tell yourself? What about the
Sovereign
?”

“We didn’t know the frigate was out there! We thought we would die without seeing another ship. How could we have known?”

“That’s why men shouldn’t take it upon themselves to play God.” Sebastian shifted his grip. “I’m going to ask you a question, and I want you to think very hard before answering. After the crew mutinied and abandoned ship, were any of the men left aboard?”

“Crewmen, you mean? No. Only Bellamy, the three ship’s officers, and the boy. Why? Who do you think is doing this? You have some idea, don’t you? Who is it?” His voice rose. “What aren’t you telling me?”

Sebastian simply shook his head. “It hasn’t struck you as peculiar that this killer knows exactly which lots you each drew after the boy’s murder?”

The tic began to play at the edge of Atkinson’s mouth. “Peculiar? It’s terrifying! It’s as if he were there on the ship with us. But that’s impossible, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

Sebastian gave the man a nasty smile. “You tell me.”

“I told you before. I don’t know who’s doing this.
I don’t know
.”

“It’s too late to save yourself. When Jarvis hears you murdered his son, you’re going to wish you did die on that ship.”

“It wasn’t me! I didn’t have a cutlass! It was one of the others.”

“You think that will make a difference to Jarvis?”

Atkinson’s entire face convulsed. “No. I know it won’t. We all know it won’t. Why else do you think we’ve kept silent?”

“Why? Because you value your own lives more than you value the lives of your sons.” Sebastian let the man go and stepped back. “When was your boy taken?”

Atkinson adjusted his cravat and gave the lapels of his coat a twitch. “This morning, early. He was gone from his bed when the household awakened.”

“He was taken from the house? I thought you had Bow Street Runners watching him.”

“Two of them. Someone broke the lock on the back door.”

“And where were your Runners while all this was happening?”

“One was watching the front of the house from across the street.”

“And the other?”

“Was found insensible in the garden.”

Sebastian suppressed an oath. If the killer followed his established pattern, the boy’s butchered body would be discovered in some prominent spot early tomorrow morning. It was still possible that the boy was alive someplace. But their chances of finding him before he was killed diminished with each passing minute.

“Let me see the boy’s room,” said Sebastian.

Atkinson stared at him. “What?”

“You heard me. I want to see the room from which the boy was taken. Quickly.”

Anthony Atkinson had occupied a chamber on the third floor, just off the schoolroom. It was a typical boy’s bedroom, its shelves crammed with books and birds’ nests and all manner of wondrous and special things.

Standing on the braided hearthrug, Sebastian thought about the towheaded lad he’d glimpsed in the Square, his cheeks flushed, his eyes bright with merriment. The boy might have been younger than the other victims, Sebastian realized, but he was a sturdy, healthy lad; he would not have been easy to subdue. Especially without waking either his family or the servants.

A small girl’s voice came from the doorway to the schoolroom. “Are you looking for Anthony? He’s not here.”

Sebastian turned to find young Miss Atkinson watching him with wide, solemn eyes. He went to hunker down before her.

“Did you hear Anthony leave this morning?”

She shook her head. “No. I didn’t hear anything.”

“Have you noticed anyone watching you the last few days? A man, perhaps? Or maybe a woman?”

Again, she shook her head.

Frustrated, Sebastian shoved to his feet. It was when he was turning to leave that he saw it: a glint of blue-and-white porcelain peeking out from beneath the counterpane. He knew what it was even before he stooped to pick it up.

It was a Chinese vial. An opium vial.

S
ebastian was paying off his hackney outside Newgate Prison when he heard a man’s high-pitched voice calling his name.

“Lord Devlin.”

Sebastian turned to find Sir Henry Lovejoy coming out of the prison’s formidable gates.

“I stopped by your house this morning, my lord, but was told you were not in. I assume you’ve heard the news about young Anthony Atkinson? Dreadful business this. Just dreadful.”

Sebastian stepped out of the path of a passing ironmonger’s wagon. “Who was it pushed for the arrest of Brandon Forbes?”

“Sir James Read and Sir William both. Lord Jarvis has brought considerable pressure to bear on Bow Street to solve this case, and the magistrates are always anxious to curry favor with the Palace.”

Sebastian squinted up at the prison’s dark, oppressive facade. “And now that Anthony Atkinson is missing? Will Mr. Forbes be released?”

Sir Henry sighed. “I fear not. Sir James in particular contends that the disappearance of the young Atkinson boy in no way absolves Mr. Forbes of the earlier murders.”

“That’s preposterous.”

“That’s the law. Thanks to your admirable detective work, it appears that Mr. Forbes possesses a powerful motive to have committed the murders, and I fear the gentleman has no verifiable alibi for the nights in question.”

Sebastian swore long and hard. “So what exactly is being done to find Anthony Atkinson?”

“As I understand it, Bow Street has some twenty men combing the countryside around Forbes’s estate.”

“Bloody hell. The boy’s not there.”

“So it would seem.”

Sebastian found Brandon Forbes seated at a writing desk in one corner of a surprisingly large room overlooking the street. The rattle of the jailer’s keys brought the gentleman’s head around. At the sight of Sebastian, he grunted.

“It’s you I’ve to thank for my being here, I take it.”

Sebastian ducked his head through the doorway and waited while the jailer locked the door behind him. Newgate could be relatively comfortable for those with a few extra pounds to buy themselves a private cell, some furniture and bedding, and food. But the dank air still reeked of excrement and despair, and the threat of the hangman’s noose was like an unseen presence in the room.

“Indirectly,” Sebastian admitted.

Forbes laid aside his pen. The bluff, good-humored country squire who’d walked the fields of his Hertfordshire estate was gone. The man before Sebastian now was pale and anxious. “You think I did it?” he asked. “You think I butchered all those young men?”

“No.”

Forbes grunted. “Why not? Everyone else does. My arrest ties it all up in a neat package.”

“Except for this morning’s disappearance of young Anthony Atkinson.”

“Yes, well, I could have an accomplice, couldn’t I? That’s what they’re saying. Someone who nabbed young Atkinson to confound the authorities and make it appear that I’m innocent.”

“I don’t think so.”

Forbes pushed up from his desk and went to stand at the window overlooking the front of the prison. “That’s where they hang them, you know. Those who have been condemned to death. Right there in front of the prison. You ever see a hanging?”

“Yes.”

“I saw one once. In St. Albans when I was a boy. My father took me to see it over my mother’s objections. Some lad who’d pinched a bolt of cloth from a shop. I was ten at the time, and I don’t think the boy was much older. They botched his hanging something terrible. Took him fifteen or twenty minutes to die. In the end, the hangman wrapped his own arms around the poor lad’s legs and pulled in an attempt to break the boy’s neck, but even that didn’t work. He suffocated slowly. Very slowly.”

“I won’t let you hang for this,” said Sebastian.

A wry smile touched the man’s lips. “Pardon me if I’m not comforted.”

Sebastian searched the other man’s plain, weather-darkened face. “Is there anything else you can tell me about your son—anything at all—that might help?”

“No.”

“No one you know who might have felt compelled to avenge the boy’s death?”

The man’s face paled, and Sebastian knew he was worrying about the suspicion that would now also fall on his surviving sons, the boy studying at Cambridge and his older brother. “No!”

“I didn’t mean your older sons,” said Sebastian.

Forbes went to sit on the edge of the bed, his hands clasped between his knees, his head bowed. After a moment, he said, “It is possible that someone…” He hesitated, then swallowed hard. “You see, Gideon wasn’t actually my own child. Oh, I raised him as my son, and God knows I loved him like a son. But he was not the issue of my loins.”

“What?”

Forbes kept his gaze on the stone paving beneath his feet, a tide of color staining his cheeks. “It’s not the sort of thing a man speaks of ordinarily. But…My second wife—Gideon’s mother—she was already some three months gone with child when I married her.”

Sebastian leaned forward. “The father—who was he?”

“I don’t know. She never told me and I never asked. Her parents never knew she was with child. I gather they had objected to the match because of the man’s religion.”

“Where was your wife raised? In Hertfordshire?”

“No. She was from a village called Hollingbourne, in Kent.”

Sebastian thrust up from his seat. “Is that near Avery?”

Forbes’s head came up, his mouth slack with surprise. “How did you know?”

S
ebastian could hear thunder rumbling in the distance by the time he reached Brook Street. He set his groom, Giles, scrambling to saddle the Arab, then sent for Tom.

Sebastian was in his library, loading a small pistol, when Tom scooted into the room. “I want you to find Sir Henry,” said Sebastian, slipping the flintlock into his pocket as he briefly ran through the conversation with Forbes. “Tell him what I’ve discovered and where I’ve gone.” He squinted up at the leaden sky and paused to throw a cloak over his shoulders. It was going to be a wet ride.

“I could come with you,” Tom said. He had to trot to keep up as Sebastian crossed the gardens toward the stables, jerking on his leather riding gloves as he went. “You could send Giles with the message and—”

“No. This man is a killer. I want you well away from him. You deliver the message to Sir Henry, and then you await me here. That’s an order.” Sebastian gathered the black’s reins, but paused to give the boy a hard look. “Do you understand me?”

Tom’s shoulders slumped. “Aye, gov’nor.”

Sebastian settled into his saddle and felt the mare tremble beneath him, as if she could sense his urgency and was eager to be off. But he held her in check long enough to lean down and say to Tom, “Disobey me in this, and I swear to God, I’ll take it out of your hide.” Then he tightened his knees to send the Arab thundering down the mews.

The rain began in earnest just after Sebastian clattered across the bridge into Blackfriars Road. This was a mean part of London, the streets narrow and unpaved and filled with clutches of ragged, hollow-eyed children and crippled beggars who forced Sebastian to hold the Arab in until he was well past Greenwich Road. By the time he reached Blackheath, the rain had become a steady, wind-driven torrent that stung his cheeks and ran down the back of his neck and rapidly turned the pike into a dangerous quagmire.

How many hours had passed since Anthony Atkinson’s abduction? he wondered, pushing on. Four? Five? A part of him acknowledged that the boy might already be dead. But he clung to the hope that Anthony might yet live. It couldn’t be easy for a man dedicated to saving lives to steel himself to the brutal murder of a child.

It struck Sebastian as ironic, how a single, easily overlooked piece of information could provide a solution if one simply shifted his perspective and considered it from a different angle. He’d wondered how the killer had learned the details of the
Harmony
’s ordeal, yet he’d given little thought to Reverend Thornton’s wife, who must have faced her coming death last Christmas weighed down by the onerous guilt upon her soul. From where could she have sought absolution for the sins of murder and cannibalism? Not from the rector her husband, whose guilt was as great as her own. And so she must have chosen to unburden herself to her dear family friend and physician, Dr. Aaron Newman, never imagining that the man to whom she’d confided her terrible secret was actually the dead boy’s natural father.

Yet even armed with the truth of what had happened to Gideon Forbes and David Jarvis, Newman must have known himself to be at
point non plus
. It had been impossible for him to move against the
Harmony
’s survivors in a court of law; even if the ship’s passengers hadn’t included some of the most powerful men in the Kingdom, Newman had no proof of what had occurred on that ship beyond a dying woman’s testimony given without other witnesses. And so he had decided to wreak his own terrible form of revenge, killing not his son’s murderers, but their sons.

Thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning. And if an ox have gored a son or have gored a daughter, according to this judgment shall it be done onto him…
How much suffering and death had been wrought upon the world, Sebastian wondered, by a literal interpretation of that ancient biblical passage? Wrapping the folds of his cloak around him, he kneed the mare on ever faster through the pounding rain.

He noticed the two horsemen at the first toll. They rode up, hats pulled low, collars turned against the wind and rain just as Sebastian was passing through the gate. One of them, a tall man with a broken nose, reached down to hand their toll to the gatekeeper. He glanced up, his gaze catching Sebastian’s eye just as Sebastian set his spurs to the mare’s flanks.

After that, he was aware of them behind him, two rough-coated men riding as hard as he. Any men out on such a day would be riding hard. But when Sebastian deliberately slowed his pace at a small hamlet, the men dropped back.

Bloody hell.
He suppressed the urge to whirl and confront them. He didn’t have
time
for this.

He drove the mare on faster. He could feel her dainty hooves slipping in the soupy churned mud of the road. Rain slid in cold rivulets down his cheeks, ran into his eyes. He was shaking his head, trying to clear them, when the mare stumbled.

She pitched forward with a frightened squeal. He just managed to kick his feet free of the stirrups before she went down and rolled. His back slammed against the ground hard enough to drive the wind from his body, leaving him gasping in agony.

He was aware of the sounds of the mare scrambling to her feet, but he couldn’t move. Rain beat against his face, ran into his open mouth as he fought to draw the breath back into his aching chest. Floundering in the mud, he managed to prop himself up on one elbow. He opened his eyes just in time to see the muddy sole of a man’s boot driving toward his face. Then all was black.